About Autonomedia

Autonomedia is an autonomous zone for arts radicals in both old and new media. We publish books on radical media, politics and the arts that seek to transcend party lines, bottom lines and straight lines. We also maintain the Interactivist Info Exchange, an online forum for discourse and debate on themes relevant to the books we publish.

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Autonomedia is an anti-profit radical media collective with 501(c)3 tax-exempt status. Contributions from interested and supportive individuals or organizations are most welcome and are tax-free to the limits of the law.

Autonomedia's Jubilee Saints Calendar for 2017! Our 25th annual wall calendar, with artwork by James Koehnline, and text by the Autonomedia Collective. Hundreds of radical cultural and political heroes are celebrated here, along with the animating ideas that continue to guide this project — a reprieve from the 500-year-long sentence to life-at-hard-labor that the European colonization of the "New World" and the ensuing devastations of the rest of the world has represented. It is increasingly clear — at the dawn of this new millennium — that the Planetary Work Machine will not rule forever! Celebrate with this calendar on which every day is a holiday!

"As you've no doubt guessed, we Old Calendrists are in fact a bunch of bitter rancorous aging hippies who used to believe in Flower Power and Dropping Out and Doing Your Own Thing, and we are now discontented and disgusted by PoMo Post-Civlization, reduced to cynicism and despair by the Triumph of Money and the technologization of consciousness itself. Nevertheless, although incapable of any facile optimism, we cling to our old anti-pessimism — and continue to hope that Time can be redeemed through strategic revolutionizing of the very system of its measurement — a return to a-chronic (neo) paleolithic laziness — a permanent vacation."

What remains of being human when everything is lost? After a cataclysm destroyed their world, the dregs of Charnholm made what lives they could along its stony coast. They toil to keep flesh on their bones, and to get clean water from the richards, who live in shelter caves high above the harbor, guarded by mercenaries. To amuse themselves, the richards hold Rat Hunts in which the boldest young dregs, the Rat Hunt Boys, spear plague-ridden vermin; always in danger of a thrust from the fangs of these mutant creatures. As the Hunt grows increasingly deadly, a conspiracy begins brewing to topple the elite and abolish the dangerous game. This is the tale of how they came to rebel, and what success they had.

“In a society of dregs serving the richards in myriad roles — rope dancers, smiths, scutmen, scavengers, harem horii, beaters, rat hunt boys, and rimers — it is Mary Kath M’Cool, apprentice rimer anathematizing rats with verse for hunt boys to more easily skewer, who one day asks her beloved brother, Finn, ‘Are we no the many, they the few? Nobbut a few shelter caves and hundreds of dregs?’ Half the pleasure in reading The Rat Hunt Boys is following the four children of Cider Mother into awareness of who they are and where they could be, and half is the fertile and alliterative, lovely-gruesome, bramble-lyric lexicon Anna Mockler coined to transport us to Charnholm a generation after The Burning where light-boned, agile spawn go spag diving to keep the lamps lit, and dregs sing the revolution.’’ — Amy Holman

“The perfect story to read aloud either to your elders or youngsters, whomever is stranger. If language is a virus, as Burroughs put it, this strain of pidgin is mutantly vaccine resistant, bubonic in its intensity; a queerly affecting tale of creatures ravaged by apocalyptic misadventure.’’ — Kevin Riordan

“Ron Kolm’s Night Shift stands alongside other wage-slave masterpieces like Charles Bukowski’s Factotum and Harvey Pecar’s American Splendor. Winking and grinning in the face of punch-clock death, Kolm finds a way to somehow stay alive and even to eventually triumph. One senses in these moving and sometimes hilarious little vignettes that Kolm wrote them in flagrante dilecto; a gypsy moth blue collar poet-scholar recording his emergence from sooty cocoon to winging oracle of the smokestacks, junkyards, tenements and roads of the national creep-scape.’’
— Alan Kaufman, author of Drunken Angel; editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Literature

“Kolm has always been a true NYC poet, with a sensitive urbanity and absurdist humor that barely looks both ways as taxis filled with rich yupsters swerve around downwardly mobile moppets with new wave beards. His is a voice that realizes the foreverness of beat vision. Where we all come together to love the noise of the great metropolis we are lucky to have this guy in the room.”
— Thurston Moore, author of Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture and Stereo Sanctity -– Lyrics & Poems

“Ron Kolm is an American original and Night Shift is a testament to a life lived in the margins — which is where the real action has always been. Wise, ribald, human, unexpectedly soulful, these stories have the grit and rhythm of real live as filtered through a sensibility finely tuned to the absurd and comic.’’
— Michael Lindgren reviews for the Brooklyn Rail, L Magazine and Rain Taxi

A collection of little seen (or unpublished) writings from one of the most interesting, well-traveled, controversial, iconoclastic thinkers (and good writers!) of his time.

Included are an interview (done by Antero Alli) originally published in Ravenmagazine in 1994, "The Caravan of Summer" originally in Gnosis in 1996, "My Summer Vacation in Afghanistan", "Roses and Nightingales," and "Grange Appeal," all published in Fifth Estate in the early 2000s, and a previously unpublished interview done with High Times.

“I believe that we can bring the deepest language from the mind. This language. All of it. I believe that when we listen deep, deep as cavefolk cut, we find the scratch or cough in stone from which the letters rose, still rise — the written language that comes before all speech… For we are primates of the sign.’’

OPENING THE SEALS represents poet Robert Kelly’s workings, starting in 2000, with the radical suggestions by the historical linguist Patrick C. Ryan towards the reconstitution of what he calls Proto-Language — a linguistic substrate, ca. 100,000 BC, to all extant human languages — the real Nostratic before Nostratic, ‘our’ language. Ryan argues for a set of meaning-bearing monosyllabic sounds, that work like roots or racemes or perhaps leitmotifs in subsequent languages.

In Kelly’s poems, each section begins with one of the Meaning-Bearing Monosyllables, and “meditates as well as I can contrive on the sound and its range of meanings. And let me say that it is the range of meanings that Ryan finds subtended or implied by the syllable that first caught my attention and excited me: not so much, then, the sense of the sound as a root, but the sound as a complex aural seal, which has to be opened to find all the meanings it proposes — and thus connects…. As if the secret affinities of all things and processes in the world were already encoded in these beast sounds our sweet mouths still fashion.’’

ROBERT KELLY is the Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature at Bard College and codirector of the Bard WrittenArts Program. He was the founding director of the Writing Program of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, and is a contributing editor of Conjunctions.

2016 Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints
Radical Heroes for the New Millennium!
James Koehnline and the Autonomedia Collective Autonomedia's Jubilee Saints Calendar for 2016! Our 24tht annual wall calendar, with artwork by James Koehnline, and text by the Autonomedia Collective.
Hundreds of radical cultural and political heroes are celebrated here, along with the animating ideas that continue to guide this project — a reprieve from the 500-year-long sentence to life-at-hard-labor that the European colonization of the "New World" and the ensuing devastations of the rest of the world has represented. It is increasingly clear — at the dawn of this new millennium — that the Planetary Work Machine will not rule forever!
Celebrate with this calendar on which every day is a holiday!
32 pages, 12 x 16 inches, saddlestitched
isbn 978-1-57027-308-7: price $9.95 : 32 pages
Pay for two, and we will send a third calendar for free!

Charles Stein's work comprises a complexly integrated field of poems, prose reflections, translations, drawings, photographs, lectures, conversations, and performances. His essay on Terry Winters' paintings examines a body of work that develop an abstract language that explores the interaction between information and imagination.